What Language Taught Me About Writing

Before this semester, I thought writing was mostly about grammar. Clean sentences, correct punctuation, answer the prompt. ENG 110 showed me it’s about something harder: who gets to be heard, whose language counts, and what it means when institutions decide one variety of English is the right one and everything else is a problem to fix.

That last part I already knew. I had lived it. But I didn’t have words for it until I was sitting in class reading about Standard Language Ideology — the idea that institutions don’t just prefer standard English, they treat the gap as the speaker’s fault. Rosina Lippi-Green, through Elizabeth Laurence’s review, put language to something I had grown up inside without being able to name. My Literacy Narrative started there. Writing it meant treating my own experience as evidence, which sounds simple but wasn’t. I had never thought of something that happened to me as something worth arguing from. It felt too personal, too small. But that discomfort turned out to be the point — learning to trust that a specific moment, written carefully and connected to real research, could carry an actual claim. I had to build an argument out of a personal story: open with a scene that carried meaning, build toward a claim, end without asking the reader to believe more than the evidence could support. That was new for me.

The Translation assignment was the strangest thing I did this semester. I took my LLN and rebuilt it as a spoken word piece, which meant rethinking nearly every decision I’d made. What worked on the page went flat out loud. Full sentences that felt strong when I read them silently lost all their weight when spoken. I had to find where the weight actually lived — and then rebuild the whole thing so it landed the same way in a different form. Moving the Bengali lines from the middle of a paragraph to standing alone changed everything about how that moment hit. You learn something about your own argument when you do that. What’s actually necessary and what was just fill.

The Synthesis Essay was the hardest. Building peer-reviewed sources into an argument meant reading differently — not for information but for how scholars make claims and position evidence and enter a conversation already in progress. Finding the right sources took longer than I expected. A lot of what came up in searches wasn’t peer-reviewed, or was behind paywalls, or was technically about language but not really about what I was arguing. Rose and Galloway’s research on Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement and Zong and Batalova’s data on Limited English Proficient populations weren’t just facts I could drop into paragraphs. I had to figure out what they were actually arguing, where they agreed with each other, where I agreed with them, and how all of it connected to what I was trying to say. I also had to figure out what counts as a credible source in the first place, which I had never really thought about before. I don’t read academic writing the same way now. I look for the argument, the evidence, and what they’re leaving out.

All three assignments kept returning to the same thing: language domination. Who controls the standard. Who carries the weight when they can’t meet it. My LLN put that in a parent-teacher conference. My spoken word piece put it in a voice, a pause, a chest that tightened every time the air in the room changed. My Synthesis Essay put it in conversation with researchers who had studied the same system from the outside. Together they made something I didn’t expect from an English class — a real argument, built three different ways, about something that had actually happened to my family.

I came in thinking I needed to learn how to write the way institutions expect. I’m leaving knowing the institution’s rules about language are worth questioning. Some of the best things I wrote this semester were the moments where I refused to disappear into the standard — where I used what I had actually lived, found the research that gave it context, and made a claim I actually believed. That’s what I think the class was for.